


A full education

by DyedViolet



Series: Seven Strangers and their Relevant Activities [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Humor, also if you want to look at it that way, basically if the bone apple teeth bothered you this isn't gonna sit well with you, but elias gets dunked on so..., if you want to look at it that way, imagine this takes place in like early season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:27:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23572339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DyedViolet/pseuds/DyedViolet
Summary: The anatomy students can't just be anatomy students if they want their degree. And of course, they have to thank all their teachers.
Series: Seven Strangers and their Relevant Activities [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1462642
Comments: 7
Kudos: 77





	A full education

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for things getting very gross! Teeth in apples are one thing, but I went and made about six other things out of it! At this point, it might count more as a statement for the flesh but whatevs.

“They started out so nice,” starts Professor Conroy, the grandmotherly English teacher at the other end of the table. “Usually, you don’t get any inquisitiveness with the freshmens’ required classes. It’s all just kids trying to skirt by with minimal effort. But not these seven. They all had such unique writing styles, and while their earlier assignments weren’t all that great, they were eager to ask my opinion on word choice and sentence structures, you know, those sort of stylistic choices. I believe their names were–”

“I know their names,” Jon interrupts. “We’ve had statements of these seven students from your institution before.”

“Oh. Well, that’s convenient,” she shrugs. “Anyways. In our little emergency class, there was always this constant sound of popping. I had assumed that they all did some sort of sport that left their joints stiff, but, well–” She trails off and shudders, thin shoulders retreating further into her beige cardigan.

“After a while, I started to notice it wasn’t always their joints that cracked.”

* * *

“Those little  _ terrors _ didn’t  _ deserve  _ to be in my class!” roars Professor Frode, fist pounding into the surface of the table. “How they got in, I’ll never know. Money, most likely, there was a rumor of one of those eccentric old-money families in the offices for those first few days. I swear, with what they knew of the world they should still be in  _ kindergarten _ ! I’ve had bad students before, but never like them. I’ve got ‘em all memorized, too, case I ever lay eyes on their sorry mugs again. Muster–”

“We’ve been over their names three times already,” Jon sighs into the stack of papers before him.

“And you haven’t written them down a single time!”

“Like I’ve  _ said _ , the audio recording is more than enough of a record. Now, if you would  _ please _ continue with your statement.” Frode glares at him, huffs, but in the end he crosses his arms and gets on with it.

“They didn’t know a  _ damn _ thing about history, I’ll tell you that. Always asking which country was which, and where in the world it was–didn’t know where  _ goddamn Russia  _ was, of all places. And then they’d ask what the  _ accents  _ sounded like–I don’t run a  _ goddamn circus troupe _ !” 

Jon has to stifle some sort of odd noise. If he had to guess, he’d say it was a choking sound.

“And worst of all, when they’d finally wrestled whatever useless detail they wanted out of me, they’d act out the day’s lesson like some  _ drunken toddlers _ ! Could hardly get a single damn thing right. Creepy little bastards, I tell ya. I’d smack ‘em each upside the head if I hadn’t had the misfortune of being their teacher.”

* * *

“A–are you sure it’s safe here?” squeaks Professor Nester, looking mousy in his coke bottle glasses and a lab coat better suited to a science lab than his math class.

“I assure you, your former students will not be able to find out about this,” Jon offers him, empty words that they are.

“...Fair enough,” he sighs at last. “Well, it started out as a normal enough prerequisite class. There was an overbooking, I had a free period–happens all the time. But these ones, well, I don’t know. They were engaged enough, but they’d always ask for specific applications to whatever function we were learning. Always something to do with the  _ body _ . They never let me get on with things until I could give them what they want, however half-assed an explanation I gave of it. But then they started–they started trying to  _ replicate  _ it. They figured out the exact angle needed to crack their necks, measured the curvature of each others’ jaws, a–anything, really, that I had come up with on the spot, just to mollify them.” Nester takes a shuddering sigh and wraps his arms around himself.

“I–I had to stop coming to class shortly after I taught them about half-lives. They were testing  _ poison  _ out on themselves, I think I heard them talking about knowing the exact amount it took to  _ kill _ each of them specifically. I–Of course, I tried to–to tell someone about it, but…”

“...But?”

“...That’s when they started offering to do the tests on  _ me _ .”

* * *

“–at the end of the year, they gave me a lovely little basket with a few peaches in it,” Conroy concludes. “I appreciated it, but, well… I don’t think they had peach pits. Organs, more like. I think kidneys, but I couldn’t say for sure.”

* * *

“–and the damn  _ brats _ left me with a  _ watermelon _ , of all things!” Frode ends his tirade. “I threw the damn thing out the window, thought that’d be the end of it. But it–The sound it made when it hit the pavement wasn’t like a watermelon. It was like a skull. I’ve heard more than a few skulls crack, back in my rugby days–”

* * *

“That’s quite enough, thank you,” Jon cuts him off, struggling to get him out of his chair and push him out the door.

“–A-and by th-the end of the year, they left me a–Left me a p-pom-pomegranate, they did,” Nester finishes up, shaken up by recalling every detail of his statement. “I st-still had a bit of ho-hope then, so I tho–I thought it was some sort of peace offering. B-But–But, it wa–it wasn’t–it–it was full up o-of–of–Oh, just look for yourself!”

“Good god,” Jon exclaims a bit flatly, staring at the exposed innards of the pomegranate. He inspects it as Martin guides Nester out of the room and sits him down in the one comfortable chair in the Archives, shoving a mug of tea in his hands. This pomegranate doesn’t have seeds–arils, something foggy at the back of his head corrects. Instead, every little pocket is filled with a little pocket of–? Yes, that’s flesh. Human skin, all the layers intact to make tiny pockets of squishy flesh.    
And at the edge of the cross section, where the pomegranate rind is still attached, one of the pockets had burst, leaking thin blood looking for all the world the same as the juice of the fruit supposed to be here.

“I think this is the worst of them yet,” Jon mutters. And by all metrics, he had a lot to compare it to.

* * *

“They gave me some kiwis, see, but when I started to cut into one, red started coming out, and, well–I don’t think even a red kiwi would be quite that color. You can keep the knife, by the way.”

* * *

“I normally love mangoes, so as soon as I had the time, I just bit straight into it–The skin has the same compound as poison ivy in it, but it’s still completely edible, my uncle ate them like that his whole childhood. But anyways, when I bit into it, it tasted like–Well, you can see where the bite marks reach. Please don’t make me explain further than that, I feel faint just thinking on it too much. And anyways, I should be headed to my doctor’s appointment soon–You can get brain worms from cannibalism, you know. I just hope the law doesn’t get involved with any… of this… Oh, thank you, I nearly cracked my head open on your floors. Do I recognize you? I think you dated a friend of a friend a while back.”

* * *

“I don’t want to  _ know  _ what’s in the blueberries, I just know they  _ weren’t seeds  _ and I  _ never  _ want to  _ see  _ or even  _ think about them _ ever again!”

* * *

“That is the most  _ terrible  _ fruit basket ever assembled,” Melanie comments.

“ _ I know _ ,” Jon complains, burying his face as he slumps onto his desk. Beside him, only inches from his head, is the fruit basket in question. Roughly half of its contents are bleeding, and at some point a ribbon had been tied into a pretty bow over the wicker handle. 

"None of the fruit has done me the favor of rotting, so I’ve had no choice but to collect it in this basket. People  _ ask  _ about this basket, why I never seem to eat anything from it. The excuse that none of it is ripe has barely worked since this began, and it will very soon  _ cease  _ to work."

“Well, if you’re hoping I’ll have any bright ideas to help with that, you’re outta luck. I’ve got assassinations to plan.” Suddenly, Jon’s head snaps up from his sweater sleeve cocoon.

"Perhaps… Elias would appreciate a gift."

* * *

“Oh, for me?” Elias asks the empty air. The fruit basket doesn’t respond either. He’d Looked at what Melanie was planning next, and this certainly wasn’t it. Perhaps Peter was trying to bribe him into tipping their bet a bit further in his favor. The bow was certainly his kind of touch. Almost carelessly, he reaches in and plucks out a blueberry–That pomegranate had stained half the basket, it must be at the peak of ripeness. Elias pops the blueberry in his mouth, and while letting a corpse play host for him doesn’t exactly allow for the preservation of  _ taste,  _ he can certainly experience the sensations of eating a blueberry.

“Crunchy,” he chirps to himself, and sits down at his desk. 

**Author's Note:**

> yes I made jonalias eat kidney stones. yes that's what was in the blueberries. yes I am the tiniest bit sorry for that.


End file.
